


of witches and witchers

by ohnoesidontknow



Series: sweet and simple [1]
Category: Practical Magic (1998), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: (very slight on the angst side), FWP – fluff without plot, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Kid Fic, Love Potion/Spell, M/M, Practical Magic inspired, because whyever not, good old fashioned romance, i wanted more roach, lambert is the cutest little pumpkin, shes the best girl but thats how much i could squeeze into this, sorry darling, the next fic will be all about you, theyre married harold, witch!Geralt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:46:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24027610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohnoesidontknow/pseuds/ohnoesidontknow
Summary: Although people tended to forget it, Geralt was as much a witch as a witcher.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Series: sweet and simple [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1899829
Comments: 51
Kudos: 428





	of witches and witchers

He was seven when he casted the spell, the one that was supposed to bind him to his lover by destiny.

“What are you doing?” Eskel asked, peeking out from beneath his blankets – they just went through the Trial of Grasses and he still suffered from fever chills during the nights, but his eyes, squinting at Geralt’s form in the moonlight, were bright like a cat’s, an evidence that he had passed the test.

“Psst,” Geralt hissed, settling the pot and the basket he was holding on the windowsill, careful not to make noise, his gaze darting towards the bed in the corner of the room before he turned back to Eskel. “Don’t wake Lambert.”

“I’m up! Up and awake!” Lambert protested, sitting up in his bed, his hair ruffled as always.

_“Psssst!”_ his two older brothers hissed in unison.

“What?” he asked quieter, wrinkling his nose and pouting with displeasure. He was five, a big boy already, yet his brothers always wanted to leave him out of all the fun.

“If you want Vesemir to come over to our room just go on, keep shouting, you dunce,” Eskel whispered.

“I’m not a–” Lambert started crying, before Geralt and Eskel sushed him again.

_“Psst!”_

“I’m not a dunce,” he repeated adamantly, but he did get out of his bed to pad to the window and stand on the tip of his toes check out the contents of Geralt’s basket. “Are these blackcurrants?” he asked, licking his lips and ready to grab a handful, but Geralt was quicker than him – another result of the trials –, and snatched the basket away before he could reach it. 

“That’s belladonna, not blackcurrant,” Geralt whispered mildly irritated, holding the basket high, beyond the reach of the toddler’s grabby little hands.

“You’re just being mean,” Lambert accused him, tears gathering in his blue eyes. “You’re both always so mean.” He sniffed and averted his gaze. “I want mama.”

Eskel and Geralt sighed. Lambert was taken to Kaer Morhen two months ago as an orphan and in the first three weeks he cried so much he lost his voice for the next three. Since then he improved a lot, but still, he often cried when he remembered his mother. Vesemir dealt with it quite well, but if it was Rodolf he woke up, none of them escaped the beating.

“I swear, if he starts wailing–” Eskel murmured, as Geralt knelt down to get eye-level with Lambert. 

“I know, I miss my mama too,” he confessed in a low voice, setting down the basket on the cold stone floor to show its contents to Lambert again. “But you can’t eat belladonna, because then you’re going to die. Do you want to know how I know it’s belladonna?”

Lambert nodded, wiping his nose with the sleeve of his sleeping gown.

“Because it has these leaves on the top like a funny little hat. Blackcurrants don’t have it.”

“So are blackcurrants bald?” Lambert asked, eyeing the berries with new-found curiosity. “Like Rodolf?” He grimaced, looking at Geralt questioningly. 

“Exactly, like Rodolf,” Eskel answered instead, snickering as he climbed out of his bed to join them. “So, what are you planning to do with so many Rodolfs, Geralt? If you want to slip it into witcher-Rodolf’s breakfast to give him the shits, I’m game.”

Geralt snorted, but shook his head.

“Perhaps another time. Now I’ve had something else in mind.”

“What?” Lambert asked eagerly, rocking on his heels, his eyes glued to Geralt.

“Rose, jasmine and buttercups,” Eskel said, sniffing at the pot still sitting on the windowsill, then he turned towards them, confusion clear on his face. “Are you making a love potion, Geralt? You know witchers shouldn’t fall in love, Vesemir said so.”

“I know,” Geralt shrugged, picking up the basket with the nightshades, Lambert in his heels to step by the window. Their eyes glowed gold in the full moon’s light – Lambert couldn’t wait to go through the trials and finally have those eyes like his old kitty’s, Tabby’s. “Vesemir nearly died with grief when Lady Alana passed away.”

“Then, by Melitele’s turned up nose, why do you want to be bound by destiny to fall in love with someone?!” Eskel hissed, and Geralt let on one of those wicked little half-smiles he had the misfortune to see on his face many times before he made an unexpected move on the training ground and had his practice sword at his throat the next moment.

“Because,” he explained secretively, leaning closer to them. “I will make an incantation about a person, who cannot exist. And if she cannot exist, I won’t fall in love and no one can break my heart. Ever.”

Lambert’s eyes grew wide with amazement, and even Eskel couldn’t quite hide his admiration. He might have been bad at history lessons, but sometimes Geralt could be very smart.

Geralt picked up one of the belladonna berries and raised it to the moonlight to examine it.

“B-but wait,” Eskel stuttered. As Geralt’s gaze jumped to him, for a second his eyes looked almost green, like magic people’s eyes, but that was silly, it must have been a trick of lights. “You’re not a witch. We can do signs, but we can’t do magic, not proper one. We don’t have reign over chaos.”

“My mom said magic is a battle of wills, between the unbridled chaos of the spheres and the person, who wants to mould it into shape. Anyone can do magic, who believes in it,” he said with conviction, but also a bit of sadness in his voice – he did miss his mother too. He rolled the berry experimentally between his fingers and then smirked at his brothers. “Or if it doesn’t work, we can still put the nightshade into Rodolf’s breakfast.”

That made them giggle but then they fell silent.

The full moon rose high, illuminating the room with silver light, a thin ring red as dying ember in the hearth of men’s home glimmering around it.

_Witchers don’t need fire to keep them warm,_ Vesemir told them one day.

Their blood was too cold, their pulse was too slow to ever feel the chills, unless it was truly cold.

_No matter how long you walk among men, never forget: you are not one of them._

Not anymore.

“Are you going to start it, or are we planning to stand here until dawn?” Eskel asked impatiently and Geralt rolled his eyes.

“Fine,” he huffed, closing his eyes, raising his arms high and trying to concentrate on the moonlight painting fireworks on the inside of his eyelids as his mother taught him on summer nights in their little back garden. It was more awkward doing it in front of Lambert and Eskel, standing like a scarecrow dressed in a nightshirt in the window, but he supposed he didn’t have much of a choice about it at that point. He took a deep breath. “Amor veritas. Essea dicée Cáerme. Melitele, hear my call, Geralt son of Visenna’s. I’m asking for my fate to be bound to another, whose name is– whose name i-is–” he slightly opened an eye, his ears turning red with embarrassment. “Could you say a name? Nothing comes to my mind.”

“Really, Geralt?” Eskel mocked him. “What sort of witch are you? Battle of wills, my–”

“Julianne,” Lambert chimed in, grabbing into Geralt’s nightshirt, his eyes bright with excitement. “Please say Julianne!”

Geralt nodded with a fake air of magnanimity, as if he humoured his little brother, while actually sighing with relief on the inside. He cleared his throat and continued.

“I’m asking for my fate to be bound to another, a man, whose name is Julianne.”

“A man?” Eskel grimaced.

“This is about making up an impossible person, remember,” Lambert supplied helpfully, and yelped when he got kicked in the ankle by Eskel.

Geralt opened his eyes and gave both of them a glare.

“Can’t you just shut up? I can’t concentrate like that.”

“Yes, Stregobor the almighty,” Eskel said with mock seriousness, but shut up they did, their eyes on their older brother.

“He will wait for me on the edge of the world,”Geralt said, letting the belladonna berry from their hold fall into the golden brown flower infusion in the pot with a blop, which, to both Lambert and Eskel’s amazement, turned green. “And– and when he walks the road, he will leave six footprints behind.” He let another berry disappear into the green liquid and it turned into a shade of chestnut.

“He will have the voice of a songbird and a colourful coat like one,” Eskel supplied, getting excited at the prospect that the spell might work and Geralt dutifully repeated it, dropping another berry into the pot, changing the substance bright red.

“And he will have the bluest eyes like mama!” Lambert exclaimed, and although Geralt hesitated a bit about the wording, in the end he got around it and dropped another berry that turned the concoction azure blue.

“He will have tons of gold– and yet none,” Geralt said, with a satisfied smirk, his fingertips buzzing with the familiar feeling of chaos under his skin.

“He will walk like a dancer,” Lambert said dreamily.

“And will turn his tongue like the sword of a fencer,” Eskel giggled, miming sword fight moves.

“He will be a finer bard than any troubadour in the city of Cidaris.” Geralt had never been to Cidaris, but his mother always said that city always had the best musicians from Oxenfurt– but why would that matter anyway?

“The best in the world!” Lambert cried with excitement, punching the air, forgetting about being silent. The concoction started to bubble in the pot, nearly spilling over its edge.

“And you two will love each other sooo much.” Eskel made kissy noises. “With absolute devotion–”

“And they will live together happily ever after!” Lambert exclaimed. When Geralt cracked an eye open to look at him, he shrugged sheepishly. “It’s important, Geralt,” he said in a little, pleading voice. So Geralt sighed, threw the last berry into the bubbling potion, turning it into magenta and sparkling, and parroted in a bored voice, rolling his eyes:

“And we will live together happily ever after. Now, quick, stand back,” he ordered Eskel and Lambert, and they did so without protest because at that point the pot looked like it was about to explode. Geralt murmured a few more words they couldn’t catch, then took a breath and blew on the potion.

The liquid stopped boiling and turned into something akin to pixie dust and flew out of the window to disappear into the night.

For a moment they all stood there amazed, then they heard a voice and Vesemir’s limping steps from the corridor.

“I swear to gods if they make all that noise because of a spider again–”

“Into your bed, into your bed, this is not a drill!” Eskel hissed, as Geralt grabbed the pot and the basket from the windowsill and all three of them got into the closest bed as fast as they could.

Lambert couldn’t make it to his in the furthest corner of the room, so Eskel quickly pulled him under his own covers when the door creaked open and Vesemir entered.

Silence fell on the room.

The old witcher sniffed the air.

He turned towards the beds to see all his students under their blankets. It was almost as if he heard the quick beat of their hearts, almost as if scared – but his ears often tricked him these days.

His eyes fell on Eskel and Lambert curled up by his side.

“Finally, you two get along,” he murmured with an almost-smile under his moustache, fixing the blanket so it covered them both up to their chins. Once he finished, he glanced over to Geralt’s bed. 

The little boy’s hair seemed bright red like a flame amongst the shadows of the room – also, he practically reeked of magic.

Although people tended to forget it, Geralt was as much a witch as a witcher – Vesemir tried to put it off as much as possible, but the alchemists were right, they had to take care of it as soon as he was over the exhaustion of the Trial of Grasses. But not now. Not yet.

Now Vesemir tucks his boy in, and strokes his ginger hair, red like his mother’s, wavy and soft to the touch.

And if Vesemir finds a pot and a basket smuggled under his covers, well, there were things the Witcher Council didn’t need to know. He would burn them later in his room, smelling roses, jasmines and buttercups muttering,

“I’m too old for this shit.”

* * *

Centuries later, one winter Geralt brings home a bard he met in Posada, leaving six footprints behind – his own and Roach’s – on the snowy trails leading to Kaer Morhen. When he sheds off his coat – Geralt’s coat, Vesemir recognises –, he reveals the brightest red and possibly most expensive outfit Eskel has ever seen.

If his colours were not enough to get their attention his words certainly do. More precisely, he never shuts up.

“I never thought I would meet a witcher on the edge of the world. I mean, I was born in Kerrack, into a–, well, good family, so one could ask, how did I end up–”

No one asks, but he talks and talks, until he starts to sing and fills the ancient halls of Kaer Morhen with delightful music.

“He might be an annoying kid, but he knows his craft,” Vesemir admits it, and Geralt sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose, but he does not fool anyone, they know he swells with pride when he says,

“Better than any troubadour in Cidaris.”

When Lambert arrives a week later and meets the bard, they see him smiling genuinely for the first time since his trials.

“Your eyes are blue, like my mother’s,” he says softly as an explanation that night after dinner, and the bard, whom the continent knows as Jaskier and his loved ones call Julian, blinks at him confused, but thanks him the compliment.

**Author's Note:**

> Leave comments or kudos if you feel up to it – I'm shameless enough to admit it they keep me going on the gray and blue days. <3
> 
> Also, now I'm open to requests on tumblr: ohnoesidontknow.tumblr.com


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